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The Nineties-Mentality Edition Tuesday, February 5, 2019

Do-Not-Disturb On iPhone Really Sucks (And How Apple Can Fix It), by David Gewirtz, ZDNet

The app economy has changed everything, including how we communicate. For an OS like iOS to assume that phone calls are the primary thing we either want to block or let through is a 1990s mentality.

Do Money Apps Make Us Better Or Worse With Our Finances?, by Padraig Belton, BBC

Comprehensive evidence is hard to come by, but Reykjavik-based Georg Ludviksson, chief executive of fintech firm Meniga, says people who start using finance apps spend 7% less on average in the following six to 12 months.

But he admits that simply cutting up your credit cards can have a more dramatic effect on your spending.

The Tortured Case For Deleting Instagram, by Adam Clark Estes, Gizmodo

What’s definitely true: Instagram is powered by one of the world’s most sophisticated data collection operations, and by using it, you’re feeding the beast. You don’t have to delete Instagram for that reason. There’s no other photo-sharing app that’s as popular or as culturally relevant as Instagram. It is, as I’ve said, simple and fun. It is also owned by Facebook and will continue to be controlled by Mark Zuckerberg for the foreseeable future. We can only hope the billionaire won’t ruin this fun thing, too.

Apple Money

Apple Could Pay A Reward To The 14-Year-Old Boy Who Found The FaceTime Snooping Bug, by Matthew J. Belvedere, CNBC

She said a high-level Apple executive flew to Tucson, Arizona, on Friday afternoon to meet with Grant. The executive, whom she declined to name, "thanked us in person and also asked for our feedback, asked us how they could improve their reporting process."

"They also indicated that Grant would be eligible for the bug bounty program. And we would hear from their security team the following week in terms of what that meant," she said. "If he got some kind of bug bounty for what he found, we'd certainly put it to good use for his college because I think he's going to go far, hopefully. This is actually a field he was interested in before and even more so now."

Apple Agrees To Pay Back-Taxes To French Authorities, by Simon Carraud, Reuters

U.S. technology giant Apple said it had reached a deal with France to pay an undeclared amount of back-dated tax, with French media putting the sum at around 500 million euros ($571 million).

Apple Is Squirreling Away Money To Pay For Lawsuits Related To Its iPhone 'Batterygate' Throttling Scandal, by Business Insider

Apple said in a recent SEC filing that it has set aside some money to pay for the litigation as a contingency.

When I Fall On My Face

A Secret To Success: The Failure Résumé, by Tim Herrera, New York Times

When things go right, we’re generally pretty good at identifying why they went right — that is, if we even take time to analyze the success at all. Preparation, proper scheduling, smart delegation and so on. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But falling on our face gives us the rare opportunity to find and address the things that went wrong (or, even more broadly, the traits or habits that led us to fail), and it’s an opportunity we should welcome.

That’s where the failure résumé comes in. Whereas your normal résumé organizes your successes, accomplishments and your overall progress, your failure résumé tracks the times you didn’t quite hit the mark, along with what lessons you learned.

Stuff

Target Stores Now Accepting Apple Pay In The U.S., by Luke Dormehl, Cult of Mac

While it’s big news for any retailer with 1,821 stores to be hopping on the Apple Pay bandwagon, this is especially significant since Target was previously a notable holdout to this technology.

Try On Your Next Pair Of Glasses Using Just Your iPhone, by Arielle Pardes, Wired

Eyewear-makers stand to gain loads from these apps. For one thing, advances in face-mapping technology translate well to stuff you wear on your face—which is why cosmetic brands like L'Oreal, Cover Girl, and Sephora have each developed their own versions of virtual try-on for makeup. It also reduces some of the friction in buying eyeglasses, and not only for the consumer; brands like Warby Parker can't keep their show floors stocked with every single frame or offer all of them for home try-on.

Eve's HomeKit-Enabled Light Strip Now Available For Purchase, by Juli Clover, MacRumors

First announced at CES, the Eve Light Strip is advertised as the brightest HomeKit-enabled LED strip to date with 1,800 lumens and support for full-spectrum white and millions of colors.

Develop

Navigation Should Be Boring, by Allen Pike

With a delightfully boring navigation scheme, users don’t need to learn how to explore your app. Their “attention span budget” can thus be spent considering how your new thing can fit into their lives, rather than trying to recall how many fingers they’re supposed to drag from the left side of the screen in order to pull out the Alternate Quick Access Wheel.

Despair, Ty Name Is App Store, by Daniel Kennett

When this tiny blip in the App Store’s CDN propagation goes away, I’ll forget about it soon enough. Hell, in the morning this post will probably seem melodramatic even to me, even if the problem is still ongoing. Especially if it’s resolved.

I’m writing this for the next time I’m sitting at my laptop at 2am, head in my hands, wondering why I’m gambling my livelihood and reputation on a company that takes 30% of my app’s sales and delivers, well… this.

Tech Is Splitting The U.S. Work Force In Two, by Edurado Porter, New York Times

The forecast of an America where robots do all the work while humans live off some yet-to-be-invented welfare program may be a Silicon Valley pipe dream. But automation is changing the nature of work, flushing workers without a college degree out of productive industries, like manufacturing and high-tech services, and into tasks with meager wages and no prospect for advancement.

Notes

The Inventor Of The Hololens Just Left Apple, by Janko Roettgers, Variety

AR/VR pioneer and Hololens co-inventor Avi Bar-Zeev left Apple last month, Variety has learned. Bar-Zeev had been working on Apple’s augmented reality headset, which the company has been developing in secret for a possible 2020 launch.

Bar-Zeev confirmed his departure when contacted by Variety, saying: “I left my full-time position at Apple in January. I had the best exit one can imagine. I have only nice things to say about Apple and won’t comment on any specific product plans.” He added that he planned to consult in the AR space while “noodling” on the next big thing.

How Slack's New Logo Became A Lightning Rod For Everything Bad On The Internet, by Nicole Nguyen, BuzzFeed

Designers in 2019 face all kinds of challenges. One of them: figuring out how trolls are going to turn their logos into swastikas or human genitalia.

Bottom of the Page

Welcome to the Year of the Pig. Here's another chance to set New Year resolutions.

(Of course, there is no reason why one can only set New Year resolutions at the transition to a new year on some random calendar system. One can definitely set new resolutions, form new habits, or change to a new diet anytime.)

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I uses my iPhone for both work and personal life. (This is probably what many iPhone customers do too.) And I want to set a different Do-Not-Disturb schedule for work-related notifications and personal-life notifications.

There are some apps that I only use for work (hello Microsoft!) and there are other apps that I only use outside of work. And then there are also apps that I use for both work and play.

Getting the user experience just right for a finer control of Do-Not-Disturb is not going to be easy. (There is a team messaging app that I use at work that has such a 'fine' control of notifications that I've spend multiple days playing around with the settings to get things right.) But if anybody can solve a UX problem, it has to be Apple, right?

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Thanks for reading.